AtScale Hires New Customer Success Executive To Oversee Development Of Services And Solutions Partners Can Leverage

Big data analytics software developer AtScale has named former Cloudera executive Kip Bowes to be the company's first vice president of customer success, a job that includes working with AtScale channel partners to better service enterprise customers.

Bowes, who has led service and customer success organizations at Oracle, Endeca, Tibco, Macromedia and Allaire Corp., started with AtScale just before the first of the year. The company announced his hiring today.

While Bowes has worked for large corporations, in an interview with CRN he said his preference is to work for startups and small companies that are on a growth trajectory.

"I'm very excited about working for high-growth organizations," he said. At Cloudera, another fast-growing big data company, he ran the services organization for the Western U.S., China and Asia/Pacific/Japan region, helping drive that company's growth up through its initial public offering last year.

AtScale, founded in 2013 and based in San Mateo, Calif., develops software that provides a link between popular business analytics tools like Tableau and QlikView and "data lakes" in Hadoop clusters and other data store systems, providing business users with a way to access and analyze huge stores of data.

The company's software, the AtScale Intelligence platform, has been on the market for about two and a half years. In 2017 the company, which also raised $25 million in Series C financing last year, expanded the range of data sources supported by the software.

Bowes said the adoption and deployment of AtScales' software has reached the stage among enterprise customers where the company needs to build out a more comprehensive framework of consulting, education and support services for customers. His job is to develop those services and hire the customer managers who will work with customers through the adoption lifecycle.

Another facet of his job is to develop implementation methodologies and fixed-price, fixed-duration services that AtScale and its channel partners – including solution providers such as Cognizant and Deloitte – will use to better deliver AtScale solutions.

"As customers are maturing in their use of AtScale, they need help to visualize the solutions [and] build their big data strategy," Bowes said of the role of the channel. "So part of my charter is also to make partners successful. There's a big channel component in this role."

While AtScale initially sold direct to early-adopter customers, an increasing number of deals are now sourced through partners and just about all sales or implementations are in some way influenced by a partner, said chief marketing officer Bruno Aziza, on the interview call with Bowes.

"My goal is not to build a huge services organization," Bowes said. He will enable partners to work with customers and essentially become "a virtual service organization."